like a thread of scarlet
by Padfoot Reincarnated
Summary: Sleekeazy's Super Shine Hair Potion to take the oil from her hair, Perpetual Pinch and Primp so her cheeks wouldn't be so flat and colorless, three dozen different tubes of Littleton's Lifelong Lipstain: this is the collection of makeup that Pansy has been building up ever since she turned thirteen and grew so rapidly she ended up with stretchmarks. Pansy/Padma, PP/DM, PP/OFC.


Sleekeazy's Super Shine Hair Potion to take the lankiness and oil from her hair, Perpetual Pinch and Primp so her cheeks wouldn't be so flat and colorless, three dozen different tubes of Littleton's Lifelong Lipstain: this is the collection of makeup that Pansy has been building up ever since she turned thirteen and sprouted breasts so rapidly she ended up with stretchmarks along her sides and over her ribcage.

Her mother frowned when she noticed them, on the Riviera, when Pansy struggled to flatten her chest into last summer's bathing suit. She'd been wearing nothing but oversized robes since she'd started noticing the changes in her body, and had even considered casting a disillusionment on her chest.

"Oh, love," said her mother. "You should've said something, and I could've given you a potion, slowed it down a bit."

It was the first time anyone had said anything about it. Some part of her, she realized, had hoped that the changes were all in her head. She crossed her arms, and tugged her bikini bottom down, hoping to cover the little bits of black hair she knew were coming out around the edges. "Can't you fix it?"

She didn't start to cry until her mother drew her close. "There's nothing to fix," she said. "This is how you look now. You're still beautiful, still my little flower. You're just growing up."

There was distance between her body's and her mother's that shouldn't have been there; there was a hard little pain right over her heart.

"I just want to be pretty," Pansy said.

"There are things I can help you with," her mother said.

That was the beginning.

* * *

By the time fourth year rolls around she's gotten better at using the things her mother gave her. It's fun, even: a streak of glitter across her eyelids, a swoop of black around the rims. And red lips, always.

People start to stare, but she finds that she doesn't mind. She wants to be unnerving. She wants them to worry when they see her coming.

And it works, mostly. She can use her paints and brushes to draw people in or to repel them. Her skin, her bones, herself: she owns them all in a way that she never has before.

She kisses Draco outside the Yule Ball. It's so frigid that she's slipped her arms into the loose sleeves of his dress robes, up to her elbows. There are streaks of green and silver around her eyes, winging up to her eyebrows, and a ring of emeralds around her throat. Draco looks at her necklace as she brushes her hand against his cheek.

She wants him to look at her but she won't, so she dips her head a little so his eyes fall into hers. He's shaking a little, and it's that that makes her smile. He'll do anything he wants her to. She isn't herself; she feels too big for her own body.

His eyes are little unfocused moons when she moves his hand to her breast. He gasps and she doesn't feel anything other than relief, and a vague sense of contentment. He'll do anything she wants him to.

He's hers.

* * *

A wand at her throat, the hiss of water pouring out the sink and onto the Pureblood bathroom floor, coconut soap. With her free hand Pansy pushes Padma back against the sink.

"I thought better of you," says Padma. "You were our friend."

"That was years ago, Patil."

"I don't give a damn. Pansy bloody Parkinson. Who are you? What happened to you?" She presses her wand against the bones of Pansy's neck. The tip of it is hot and red.

Pansy's face is bare and her body is naked. Padma has come ready for a fight.

"What are you going to do to me?" she asks.

Padma leans in a little closer. "I'm going to make you fucking pay," she says, and for a moment all that Pansy can see is Padma as a little girl, tugging Padma under her bed so they could look together at the books that Padma had stolen from her mother, and the way Padma's hair had come unplaited at the bottom.

"Come on then," Pansy says. Padma jabs her wand into Pansy's chest, draws it down slowly, as if she is deciding where she can hurt her the most.

She hesitates, with her wand pointed at the center of Pansy. There are little black hairs on Pansy's belly and she flashes hot with shame when she sees that Padma can see them, and she thinks of Padma at fifteen, visiting Pansy's home for the summer, borrowing Pansy's makeup collection. The soft copper tint to her lips, the purple cast to her lashes, the rose of her cheeks, the way that Pansy couldn't stop looking at her.

* * *

She isn't wearing any makeup the first night she fucks Draco, and maybe that's why it doesn't work. She hasn't painted her face the way she used to, before the war, before the trials. Others might have noticed but Draco was the only one who asked why.

"They'll think I'm hiding something."

"And aren't you?"

He smells of old sweat and whiskey and something like cinnamon when he kisses her, and it's like an old habit the way their lips slide together, the absent way they slot together.

"You don't look like yourself," he whispers. She closes her eyes. She knows that he is looking at her. "I used to know what you wanted from me," he says, but she doesn't think he does, because she's never quite known herself what she wants from Draco.

She slides herself on top of him, pulls his hands onto her hips, presses them into her flesh and pretends that he's moving her against him when really it's her will, her muscles and bone, pulling him deeper and deeper into her body. His hair is long. He could almost be his father.

She rolls her hips forward and slides against his skin. She closes her eyes, but she knows he's watching her. And when she opens them, he is, staring up at her through half closed eyes. When her hands move off of his, he lets his palms drop empty to the bed, as if touching her costs more effort than it's worth.

She slides off of him, and lays down an inch or two away. The space between them cools rapidly and her skin is sticky from their sweat.

"Pansy," he says. "I'm sorry." He takes her hand.

"You don't want this," she says.

"I don't want anything," he says.

* * *

It's the work of a moment. One hand goes down, grabs Padma's wand and stabs it into her own stomach. The other swings wide, hits bone, and sends Padma reeling into the sink. She flips the wand and points it at Padma's throat. Padma stumbles into one of the jets of water still pouring from the walls, she slips, goes down with a crack, her skull sounding like nothing so much as a misplaced curse cracking against the tree.

Padma shakes her head, snarls, her beautiful features distorted and savage. No one other than Pansy puts much care into their looks, these days. Padma looks tired. Pansy lets the wand drop, a little, and it's enough of an opening for Padma to dig her nails into Pansy's ankle, to kick out the back of her knee and drag her legs out from under her. And the moment it takes Pansy to recover from that is enough time for Padma to flip herself onto Pansy. Pansy's hand, and Padma's wand, are pinned between their bodies.

"You bitch," Padma says.

Her knee falls between Pansy's legs. She doesn't gasp, quite, but her breath catches in her throat, just at the place where the warm red stain of Padma's wand is spreading. She looks down at her body, to where Padma's breasts are pressed against hers. Her robes are soft like butter and they puddle in the folds of Pansy's body. The wand is hard against her breastbone.

Padma moves her leg again, deliberately, and this time Pansy does gasp. Her eyes slide back into her head. She presses up against the pressure from Padma's leg, and when Padma begins to rock against her, Pansy slides herself up Padma's thigh. She can't tell the wet of her body from the wet of Padma's robes.

Padma lifts herself up on her elbows, leans up so her face is just above Pansy's, and Pansy thinks of Padma as she looked yesterday, shredding a hole in her robe as she watched Pansy practice her _Cruciatus_ on a niffler. She's not good enough yet to cause much damage on a person, yet, but she will be, or so they say, but after Dark Arts yesterday Padma held Pansy's hair back while Pansy vomited into a toilet on the fifth floor.

"You don't have to do this," Padma had said.

"Get the bloody hell away from me, you fucking Muggle lover."

Pansy's eyes stay closed. The floor is hard on her back but other than that they might be outside, somewhere in the rain. Padma's breath smells like peppermint and pumpkin juice, just before she presses a kiss against Pansy's throat. She drags her mouth up the side of Pansy's face, never quite stopping again to kiss her, and Pansy tilts her face in the hope that her mouth will find Padma's, that a kiss might happen without either of them exactly choosing it.

* * *

"You can watch," she tells him.

Ionotta is waiting for her two rooms down. They've been together for six months or so, since meeting at a bar in Milan. Ionotta has dark hair and heavy breasts and she is as different from Draco as anyone could be. It's not why Pansy wants her. But she wants Draco to see her the way that Ionotta does, the way that she sees herself. She wants him to see Ionotta wanting her, wants him to see the way that Ionotta leaves bruises on his hips and scratches on her chest. She wants Draco to see her breasts hardening and swelling under Ionotta's tongue. She wants Draco to see what she, Pansy sees, when she watches Ionotta and herself fucking in the mirror. She loves the tangles that weave themselves into her hair, and she loves the savage cast to Ionotta's eyes when she pins Pansy to the bed.

"That's very kind of you," Draco says, raising his eyebrows.

"I'm serious," says Pansy. She slides herself into his lap and smiles. Today she's painted a bow on her lips, and given her eyebrows a high, sharp arch. She can do anything she wants with her face and she will still look the way she wants to feel. Draco isn't so lucky. He pushes her away, a little, before he relaxes back into the chair, as she knew he would. "She's beautiful," Pansy says.

"And wouldn't you rather keep her for yourself?"

"No," says Pansy. But sharing Ionotta isn't really the point.

She doesn't want Draco anymore, not the way she used to. There used to be a place inside her where she thought that he might fit. But she misses the way it used to be with him, the way he used to need her. Things were better before, she sometimes things. Or maybe she was better before.

Her body has changed, in the decade that she's left Hogwarts. There's a softness to her stomach that never was there before, but she wears robes that hide that easily enough, and for Ionotta and the others, men and women, there are charms she can use. There's a glamour spell that she uses on her legs to make the stretch marks there resemble muscle, and she paints a shadow between her breasts to make the space there look the way it did when she was younger. It's good enough to fool everyone who looks at her. But she doesn't know if it's good enough to fool Draco.

She breathes into his ear, and she feels him shudder against her. He looks down. "I don't want this, Pans," he says.

She feels cold, drawing away from him.

"Fine," she says.

That night she tries to watch Ionotta, to look at the way Ionotta's face curls up when Pansy is between her legs. She notes the way that Ionotta's fingers twitch as she begins to lose control. She kisses Ionotta along the lines of her hips. And when Ionotta comes, Pansy watches her face as her mouth twists open and her eyes screw shut. It looks like she's in pain.

"What do you I look like, when I come?" Pansy asks Ionotta.

"You look beautiful."

Pansy doesn't believe her.

* * *

" _Petrificus Totalus,"_ whispers Padma into Pansy's ear.

She's frozen with her legs slightly open, with the place between them slightly dripping, with her mouth caught open in search of a kiss, her neck tilted up and exposed.

Padma drags her wand across Pansy's throat, lightly, and doesn't leave a mark, then traces a line down Pansy's middle, between her breasts, over her navel, and brings it to rest against her hip bone.

Padma is shaking a little, but not much, and her breath is heavy.

"I won't do anything else to you," she said. "Let them see you like this. Let them see you where you can't hide."

It's hours before she's found, and before she's found all her makeup is washed away.

* * *

 **Hope you enjoyed!**


End file.
